SFF stories, plus squid (self-publishing diary)

JournoWriter said:

Love the cover! The blurb sounds interesting, too. Looking forward to it!

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I consider the description a bit of an experiment. I generally favour more plotish ones, but urban fantasy tends to have more character-focused ones, so I ended up with that.

Storm Surge said:

That is a lovely cover!

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Thank you!

February sales...

Rainbow Lights (SFF collection):
AMZ US: 2

By Means of Clockwork Selection (steampunk novelette):
None.

In February I had a surprise review for Rainbow Lights. The two sales came in the couple of days after the review, so it's fair to assume they were connected. Though I don't think sales of the shorts/collections will ever be huge, they do continue to trickle in.

Mostly though, I've been working behind-the-scenes getting novel stuff done. It's set for the March release, so I'll have more to say at the end of the month about what I've done and whether it meant any sales.

I had a slight delay due to illness, but the release is now happening. The blog post with cupcakes is up and I tweeted about it. In the next few days I'll update my other social networks and contact the review sites who want requests with a buy link.

Mostly there was nothing new with this release, as I've done it all before with the shorts. If it wasn't for being ill, I would have released exactly on time, as I'm better at judging how long things will take now. I did have an awkward social issue though, as out of the blue, someone related decided to leave a review. This hasn't happened before and the family have never shown any signs of wanting to review. So next release, we'll have to have the talk about why it looks bad if my relatives leave me glowing reviews on release day. And meanwhile, I'll sit here feeling embarrassed until I have enough reviews to push that one down the list.

On the writing side, there's obviously new stuff here, as it's my first novel. I also had to write it in American English (or more specifically, two different dialects of American English), which is a bigger job than just exchanging a few words. I have a check list for that now, so it'll be easier when it comes to the next one. It also had a lot of cultural research, given that I'm not Native American and one of the main characters is, which means there's a short bibliography at the end.

And I actually paid money for this release... the font license for the cover cost me £25. But spread over a whole series, I should get that back pretty quickly.

March sales for Sunstruck:

AMZ US: 1
AMZ UK: 5
Smashwords: 1

I'm posting this a little early, as the sales were all in the first couple of days, so I don't expect them to change in the next day. From the numbers, probably to the same people who bought the previous titles.

I've sent out review requests, but I can't say I'm hopeful. The interest in my work isn't there and it isn't increasing, so the chances of reviews are slim. I can't afford advertising, so what I'm doing is all I have as options. I'd like to continue the series I've started, but with sales as they are, I can't justify doing so this year.

I realise that's not really the positive outcome people always hope for with these threads, but I hope it at least gives an example of what it can be like when it doesn't work out. I will be back to update if I can get my finances sorted and focus on my self-publishing again. I've enjoyed publishing my books, but right now, I need to focus on making money (which for me means short stories for magazines).

I hope you have better success with your projects, and I'll continue reading other people's diaries.

LBlankenship said:

Hang in there, Polenth. How are the sales for your other titles?

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All the sales are in the thread, so they've stopped selling.

Mclesh said:

Polenth, there is a tremendous amount of competition out there. It's really hard to sell books, period. As LBlankenship said, hang in there.

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I'd note I'm not planning to delete everything and flee or anything like that. One of the things with self-publishing is titles can sit there indefinitely. But it takes a lot of time to put together a title to self-publish. Looking for things like reviews and guest post opportunities also takes time. It's one of those cases where the rich can afford to be poor, as it's fine to spend the time for as many titles as it takes to be successful when you have another source of income. But writing is my only source of income, so I can't. I've pushed it as far as I can go in the circumstances.

It's over the one-year mark now, so time for an update. I have some short stories on submission, so I'm now balancing my time between shorts and my next novel project. I won't be posting exact monthly sales from here out, but will give a general feel for changes in sales.

My main change of focus this year is cutting down on community stuff. I like chatting to people, but it became very clear time spent on things like my blog content was wasted. Some people manage to build up a lot of interest in them as a person in a short time, but after six years I've had to acknowledge it wasn't happening.

This means having to look at ways to sell that don't involve social media or anything to do with me. One of those is to make sure books fit into a niche where there's demand, and aren't genre-crossing or otherwise tricky to define. So my next book will be a cozy mystery. It's a small market, which makes it easier for a book to be noticed. And the main lines around the genre are pretty easy to define. I'm not straying into any of the debatable areas, because I need something that's clear this time around.

I'm also removing Sunstruck from Smashwords, so I can try Amazon's various KDP Select deals. Most places took it down the next day, but the holdouts are Apple, Flipkart and Fnac (they use Kobo... the rest of Kobo's affiliates have taken it down already). The book isn't really selling, so it seems like it can't make it worse to try out some other things.

In slightly more positive news, I got two nice reviews of Sunstruck. They haven't helped with sales, but I might reach a point where there are enough reviews to start making a difference. They're Fangs for the Fantasy and Review Hart.

M. H. Lee said:

Best of luck with year 2. I will say that I've made the most (not much) from a couple of non-fiction titles in an area where I have no established expertise other than the willingness to write about 35K words about it. So, that may be something else you can consider. If you have enough passion about a topic to write about it, then I say try that route as well. You never know. Maybe even write about the challenges of being atypical. (I only say that based upon what you put in the blog post, so no offense meant.) I think far too many people are willing to talk about success and belonging and too few are willing to discuss the daily challenge of not quit synching up with the rest of the world around you.

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One of the suggestions in my roundup was a blog book of my diversity in SFF posts, which I do intend to do. I was thinking of an introduction talking about the sort of things you've suggested. I'm on the fence about whether it'd make money, but it seems a relatively quick project (as most of the content is written). I'm not sure when I'll have time for that though.

RLMcKeown said:

Your blog post was an interesting read. I had a similar experience, especially on the whole "blog/community" front. As M. H. Lee said, a lot of people following my blog just did it so I'd follow them back. I get some people who regularly "like" my posts, but they don't comment, so I doubt they're actually reading. Oh well.

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The diversity posts were read and passed around outside of people hoping for followbacks. But if a post went viral in the community, it'd be the prominent community member who linked to it who got noticed for linking to it. Six months later, people would forget that person didn't write the initial post. It's a strange kind of invisibility, where the blog was technically successful, but in a way that was completely disassociated from me.

Or as happened in one case, the people linking got hugs and apologies for the issue discussed. I got death threats. I really could have done with hugs at that point.

I don't believe it's because my blog doesn't make it obvious I'm writing it. The abusive emails always got to the right place and had my name on them. It's just positive reactions that tended to be directed to someone else. A bit of distance has made it easier to see I should have drawn the line a lot earlier. It's a lot less stressful now I'm pottering about and posting cockroach videos.

I'm interested in hearing how Select goes for you!

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Still waiting on the last few places to take it down. I'll post how long it took them once they get to it. (Or if I have to send them grumpy emails, I'll mention that too.)

The saga of getting the book taken down is ongoing. One of Kobo's affiliates still hasn't done it. I've contacted Smashwords, so we'll see if it gets sorted. In the meantime, I've joined Wattpad. I wanted to as a reader, as it's easier to bookmark stories as a member. Which seemed like a good reason to put some stuff up as a writer, as there's the potential for people finding it.

Currently, the stuff I've put up is all available online elsewhere (so it's short stories and flash fiction), which means there's nothing lost in giving it a go. It doesn't take long to transfer a story to the site. I'm also making custom covers for each one, which is good design practise. Wattpad has small cover sizes (256 x 400), which is a nice size for playing around with concepts.

My favourite of the quick covers are these two. Dead Meat is science fiction horror and Reflections is surreal / magical realismy. The Dead Meat photograph is a slice of ham. Reflections is lens flare / window reflections taken from inside a train (so actually fits the story nicely).



I'm working on the cover for the cozy mystery, but that'll be a longer process.

In generally good news, things have settled a bit as far as money is concerned. Among other things, I've sold two short stories, which helps. This means I don't have to worry as much about sales. In self-publishing news, I finally got Sunstruck into Kindle Select, which is what the rest of the post is about.


Smashwords Removal

This is the timeline for removing Sunstruck from Smashwords. I checked books were down with the list of sites on the distribution page: http://www.smashwords.com/distribution

DAY 0: Smashwords was instant, though when logged in, an author can still see the book page.

DAY 1: Removed by Kobo, Barnes and Noble and Nook. I also checked Blio (Baker & Taylor) and Page Foundry sites, which didn't list the book... though I'm not sure if they ever did.

DAY 6: Removed by Flipkart

DAY 12: Removed by Apple.

Then the issue. Fnac (French version) is one of Kobo's affiliates. Though Kobo removed it the next day, and most of their affiliates followed quickly after, Fnac showed no signs of moving. It was a difficult issue to search for, though I found a couple of people who'd had similar issues with Fnac (but no followup on whether they got it sorted).

DAY 15: Contacted Smashwords support. Received reply later that day saying it was on the spreadsheet of changes to be made they send to Kobo.

DAY 27: Tweeted @Fnac asking who to contact to get the book removed. (Someone who spoke French looked at the site for a contact, but there wasn't one for book queries apparently... so I tried tweeting). No reply.

DAY 33: Second message to Smashwords.

DAY 49: The buy buttons on Fnac were removed for both of my books. Which wasn't the intention (I was only trying to remove one), but as I've never sold anything from them, I'll take both books being taken down. The books still appear in their search... but that's technically not against the Select guidelines, so I've gone for it and hoped that's not going to cause an issue in the future.


Kindle Select

I want to run a countdown deal, but there's a delay for that anyway... so I went with a free promotion for the first cycle. The hope is I might pick up one or two more reviews, as that'll help during the countdown. But it wasn't too urgent, so I did a bit of experimenting.

For almost four days, I didn't tell anyone, to see how many people would find the book through Amazon alone. There were 108 downloads in total during this time, which split as follows:

Day 1: 62
Day 2: 14
Day 3: 19
Day 4 (Most of the day): 13

Then towards the end of day four, I did some minimal promotion. I tweeted about it, changed my signature on AW, posted on a genre Goodreads group, and submitted it to Snickslist (as the only free promo site where I could sign up and post the days instantly).

Day 4 (End of the day): 8 (giving a total of 21 for day four)
Day 5: 15

This meant total downloads of 131. When I put the steampunk novelette up previously, and got it listed on a lot of sites, it had 268 downloads. So there's a benefit in doing more promotional work, but it wasn't a whole lot and books do still get downloads without any promotion.

The minimal promotion did little in terms of quantity, but it might have benefits for quality. People on social networks/bookshelf sites are more likely to leave reviews.

The downloads weren't enough to get in the genre top 100 lists, but they're also pretty competitive lists (general mystery and urban fantasy). The also bought/viewed lists had more mysteries than anything else, which is hopeful for crossover sales when I publish the cozy mystery. And that's it for now. I'll see if I do pick up any reviews before the countdown next cycle.

Kindle Select and Kobo

Thirteen days after I joined Kindle Select, Kobo put my book back on sale. Amazon sent a message giving me five days to sort it out. I contacted Smashwords, and the book got removed before the deadline, but it was a close thing.

The result of this is I've removed my other books from Kobo, as this is the third issue I've had with them. The other two being their unresponsive affiliate and taking my collection off sale in the UK during their erotica purge... and then not putting it back after the checks were done. I may try them again sometime, but right now, removing Kobo is removing my main source of stress.


Sales Trends

Now it's some months on, I can see how Sunstruck is selling compared to the other books. It had the same sales pattern in the first few months, but then it went its own way. The collection and novelette quickly settled into selling none or one a month, and then dropped to mostly none. The novel has consistently sold at least one a month, and the last couple of months it looks like it's going up to 2-3 a month. There are also slightly more reviews for the novel. So though it's not hugely ahead, there's a sign that it'll keep on selling for longer and it's beaten the total sales numbers for the short fiction titles. It also looks as though sales are slowly rising rather than falling.

I'm not sure if the free period helped Sunstruck's sales or not, but similar to my last goes at free stuff, it did nothing to hurt them. I've also had my first Select borrow.


Next Book

The next book out is going to be a collection of my blog essays on diversity/representation. I'm expecting this to have a tiny audience and won't do a whole lot of promotion, but it's a nice way to round off my blogging time.

The cover is below. Most of my covers are done in GIMP. This mostly was, but I did the initial text placement in Corel Draw, as it has a better text-to-path system.

Sales went up this month, as I had a story out in Strange Horizons. Interestingly, few were of the book I mentioned in my author bio (the short story collection), which suggests more people click the website link (which has the novel on the first page) than read the bio. I've got a couple of other shorts coming out in the next few months, so hopefully it'll keep the ball rolling.

This is going to be my main promotion strategy from here on, as nothing else has worked as well. Plus I still get paid for the original story even if no one buys a book afterwards.

I'm not sure if anyone is still finding this useful? If not, this is probably a reasonable place to end it, as I might not have made a fortune, but at least sales seem to be slowly going up rather than down.

slhuang said:

I enjoy following your diary. And I do find it useful! I shall be sad if you end it, but of course you should do what you want; if it's a burden to update us then by all means don't worry about it.

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It's not a problem to update, but I've been talking to myself for a few months, which is unusual around here.

I find the short story thing really interesting. That's where I'm going too, since SFF has such a robust SS market. My first one is coming out in about two weeks and I'm really eager to see if I get any sort of bump in SP sales from it.

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Whether the bump shows will probably depend on your overall sales, but I think it's likely most pro and semi-pro places will get some reaction. I'm also thinking I can use the sales data to help pick out the most popular story, and use that for the branding of the next collection. The first one, I picked an unpublished story as the cover story, and that was probably a mistake (no matter how much I like squid).